Yore Playtest V: In Which Fun Makes a Surprising Appearance

With my two favorite playtesters on a honeymoon, I spent my spare time working on my new card system.  The day they got back, I realized: "If I make them play this system, they'll hate me.  Even I don't want to play this."  Somehow, I had convinced myself that adding a system involving routine mathematics was a good idea.  Perhaps I thought Yore would ship with pocket calculators and a multiplication table...

I broke my promise that we'd play at lunch, went home, and started over.  By midnight, I had the whole game simplified to its essence.  The next day, I had the decks ready.  The result was actually... fun.

Draft I: The Unused System

After the previous playtest, I wanted to try a new system. I kept chaining but tried giving each subset of of abilities a different feel.  Magic applied debuffs again, mental affected other abilities did no direct damage, and physical had brutal openings and closers.  The problem was numbers.

This card requires a degree in symbology.

Designing each system took a lot of math, as I needed each branch to scale in a linear way while being balanced against the others.  Otherwise, a magician might be the only class that could do a certain amount of damage or a mentalist might be trapped in a corner if they didn't have enough magic or physical cards.  I had hoped to do all the math on the back end so turns would move fast.  In the end, I had accomplished the opposite.  Every turn would involve multiplication and addition -- which, as an educational game, might be awesome.  As a fast-paced and entertaining board game...

Draft II: "It's like Bejeweled!" But Not

So I stripped everything.  The cards now look like this:

Physical Energy: Simple as Pie

I first removed chaining and requirements.  At that point, no text was needed.  Each card is a different type of energy - magical, mental, physical, or chaos (a wildcard).  Your enemy attacks you with a set amount of energy and you have to match that energy.  If you match each type, you defeat the enemy.  If not, you remove what energy you can and take damage that turn.

One number to rule them all:
draws 3 mana, worth 3 points

With just mana, there was little player choice, so I added ability cards back in.  This time, however, they were vastly simplified.  They cost energy to play, but they output a different type of energy.

Players could choose to buy more mana cards, new abilities (separated by tier), or level up to draw more cards during their turn.

Results
 

The game was even smoother this time.  We got through a good number of rounds during lunch and things scaled nicely.  By the third turn, one of the players could reliably attack higher level creatures.  Even better, she wanted to keep playing.  That was the most promising part of the whole experience.  I can tweak numbers endlessly, but fun is far more ephemeral.

Other thoughts

 

I. Different schools of energy still the same feel.

 

After all the work I spent differentiating the sets of abilities in Draft I, I felt like I'd stepped backwards.  While playing however, the dilemma felt less noticeable.  Perhaps, and I'll decide after additional testing, differentiation is unnecessary here.  Each mana doesn't need a different feel -- the important mechanics are in how you build your deck.

 

II. Not enough diversity in strategy.

 

I forgot the character cards for the playtest, so players could only buy action and mana cards.  Additionally, without health, losses meant nothing.  The two strategies that emerged were buying higher level ability cards and buying chaos energy.  At the start, there seemed to be no reason to buy the normal energy.  I think as the game progressed, there would be more reason, especially as you level up and can hold more mana in your hand.  Since abilities are random, it takes a little control out of player hands, but at the same time, it means they are given strategical choices on how they want to stack their mana deck.  A longer playtest would be ideal for seeing if my plans for the strategies panned out. 

 

III. Playtest structure.

 

One of the major things I'm working towards, besides better game design, is more productive playtesting.  One dilemma I've had so far is parsing player feedback.  I've found that the earlier the feedback, the more reactive and harder to appraise it is.  Early in the game, patterns have not emerged and the initial problems may just be with the way I've explained the game.  As the game goes on, those objections may disappear or even become positive situations.  

I had considered implementing the rule "no feedback until after the game", but spontaneous feedback is still valuable.  Anything that stifles responses has consequences. I think it's better to get cryptic or difficult feedback than none at all.

Note: The placeholder art in Yore comes from Lorc's icon pack